mewhat
narrow type.

The trend of things in the years 1795-7 set steadily towards rebellion.
The discontent was most threatening among the sturdy Presbyterians of
Ulster, chafed as they were by the exaction of tithes by the Protestant
Established Church. The founders and the ablest leaders of the League of
United Irishmen were Protestants. For a time they aimed merely at a
drastic measure of Parliamentary Reform similar to that advocated by
English Radicals. But the disappointment of the hopes of Grattan and
Irish Whigs in the spring of 1795 exasperated all sections of reformers
and impelled the League towards revolutionary courses. Sops like
Maynooth they rejected with scorn; and at the close of that year, after
the passing of certain repressive measures, their organization became
secret; they imposed an oath on members and gradually devised means for
organizing the whole of Ireland in brotherhoods, which by means of
district and county delegations, carried out the behests of the central
committee at Dublin.

Yet their system was far from absorbing the whole of the nation. The
vivacity of the Celt and the hardness of the Saxon tell against close
union; and where the two races dwell side by side, solidarity is a
dream. Now, as always, in times of excitement the old animosities burst
forth. The Catholic peasantry banded together in clubs, known as
Defenders, to glut their hatred upon Protestant landlords and
tithe-reaping clergy. Their motives seem in the main to have been
agrarian rather than religious; but, as in Leinster, Munster, and
Connaught the dividing lines between landlords and peasants were almost
identical with those between Protestants and Catholics, the land feud
became a war of creed. The ensuing horrors, midnight attacks,
cattle-maiming, and retaliation by armed yeomanry, exerted a sinister
influence upon Ulster, where the masses were fiercely Protestant.
Certain of the Catholic villages were ravaged by Protestant Peep o' Day
Boys, until the Irishry fled in terror to the South or West, there
wreaking their vengeance upon squires and parsons. By degrees the Peep
o' Day Boys became known as Orangemen, whose defiant loyalty sometimes
caused concern to Camden and Pitt; while the Defenders joined the
better drilled ranks of United Ireland, which therefore became a
preponderatingly Catholic body.

Thus affairs revolved in the old vicious circle. Feuds, racial,
religious, and agrarian, rent Ireland asunder.